As a para, and in many classrooms, I started an afterschool poetry club because I was disappointed with the various poems used in K-5 curriculum. The principal enthusiastically approved my suggestion, and since the club system was already in place, the recruitment process was easy.
My goals included age-appropriate poems, by international writers, that would connect with students to increase their love of poetry, knowledge, and skills. They would write their own poem weekly. At a Schoolwide Title 1 school with 41% ELL, 90% impoverished, a 26% mobility rate, the students deserved to have poets selected from their own cultures, by whom they could be represented. And to have fun using an active learning approach!
Poets featured: Bracho, Thein, Wiman, Armentrout, Boullosa, Dickinson, Hansen, Herrick, Hughes, Saw Hsa May Oo, Rossetti, Schneider, Yesenin, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Woodson, Blake, Hughes, Frost, cummings, Sexton. Difficulties included finding translations for elementary students.
Examples:
- Teach and review basic poetry ingredients such as metaphor and similes, sonics, forms.
- Clay plaque haikus in collaboration with the art teacher. Students wrote a haiku, and the next week engraved it on a clay plaque of their making.
- Origami paper fortune teller. Write from the “garden of words” on each bend of the origami. Then explore and problem solve combinations of words to write.
- Black out poems from the first page of The Little Prince.
- Poems written after a school scavenger hunt to find striking things. I photographed the item, printed them out, and we wrote the following week.
- Collaborative word poem. Poets wrote their favorite word on a card, and we used them all to write one poem.
- A cold plum picnic while reading and discussing “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.
- A velvet bag of textured items to engage their senses when writing.
The club ran for three semesters and was wildly successful, with full engaged attendance. No formal data was gathered, but smiles count. The club was given use of a central bulletin board where we showcased their work.
Each child received a binder with lined paper, pencils, fun worksheets, and poetry checklists. Some children did not have writing resources at home, and I didn’t want that to be a hindrance to their writing.
There was wider school impact, including a Poetry Planting. I hid poems around the school. When a child found one, they’d go to the school office to read the poem to a staff member and receive a prize. An unintended consequence is that the kids would trade poems to get more prizes, but since kids were reading poems—a positive outcome. We recommended teachers allow kids to read the poems to their class if they liked. Teacher buy-in was high.
Sadly the club was discontinued after I moved away, though I am told by teachers that the kids still discussed it. If you have the opportunity to start a poetry club at a school, please expect to delight in reading the very best poems, receive lots of smiles, and know your engagement with the students will let them dream and bring confidence to their lives and to their writing. Have an absolute ball!
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Vicky MacDonald Harris has poems published in The Lincoln Underground, The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets, Tiny Poems, Two Cities Review, Hobble Creek Review. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Fiery Scribe Review, Janus Literary, Strange Horizons, Ellipsis Zine, Great Lakes Review and Mantis.